The Queen’s Rd Life Room 1975-82
In these years I was working full time designing microchips, but my workplace was only about a half mile away from the Queen’s Rd liferoom and most years I was signed up for at least three three-hour evening life drawing sessions a week. I started working smaller and more often in watercolour. The poses were often quite short, 20 minutes or half hour and did not really fit the rhythms of watercolour, where you quite often have to stop working for ten minutes and wait for paint to dry if you are not going to get in an awful mess with colours running together uncontrollably. I often felt out of control in this situation but I persevered, experimented and gradually improved. Towards the end of the period I was usually working full imperial size for my watercolours. I needed larger brushes, but good quality large sable watercolour brushes were rarely obtainable, and when they were, were extraordinarily expensive. A little later, synthetic fibre brushes were marketed, and the situation improved.